17.12.17

The Frog / Žaba

Based on a record-breaking theatre play that has
been on stage for almost a decade now, The
Frog has some serious shoes to fill in
domestically and on the regional level. Directed by Elmir
Jukić who has done most of his work on
television and written by him and Pjer
Žalica (Fuse)
based on Dubravko Mihanović’s
theatre piece, The Frog strives
to be as faithful to the riginal play as possible so it keeps all of
its actors. After the world premiere at Sarajevo Film Festival, it
hits the Croatian audience at Zagreb Film Festival (out of
competition) where the script was developed years earlier through My
First Screenplay workshop.

Zeko (Emir
Hadžihafizbegović in the second great
role this year after Men Don’t Cry)
is a barber and a war veteran suffering from PTSD whose family has
left him because of his violent outbursts. He wants to start the new
chapter of his life and he thinks that the way to do it is to try to
help the only two people he cares about, his brother Braco
(Aleksandar Seksan
known for Our Everyday Life)
and their friend Švabo (Bosnian for Kraut) played by Mirsad
Tuka. They both have serious problems,
Braco is a gambler and a drunk angry about the current state of
things in the country while reminiscencing of the “golden”,
pre-war times, while cab-driving Švabo, who spent the war time
abroad (hence the nickname) and does not get all the post-war mojo
very well, cheats his wife with a much younger lover. What would be a
better day to fix their lives and make them start over again than the
Muslim holiday of Eid, so they meet in Zeko’s barber shop for a cup
of coffee, some cookies and talk, but the things get out of control
quite quickly, fights ensue and the threat of violence is constantly
in the air.

The title animal occurs in conversations twice
during the film, never in its literal form. At the very beginning, it
is an old car, Citroen DS, nicknamed the frog in parts of Yugoslavia,
once owned by Zeko’s and Braco’s father, driven by two of them
for their youthful adventures. The other frog is the character of
Haruki Murakami’s
story Super-Frog saves Tokyo
from the after the quake
[the title is being written that way] collection. For some reason,
Zeko finds the part of the story published in newspaper his new
guiding light and life’s philosophy urging people around him to
change, while being unable to change himself. The arrival of the book
salesman (Moamer Kasumović)
in the crucial moment for Zeko will explain the mystery of the latter
frog and offer a key for the interpretation of the film and the frog
as the constant search for the meaning in life, working both in local
and universal context.

Theatrical background of the source material is
notable from the setting of one single space for the most of the
time, sometimes long takes from hand-held camera and few significant
characters. Jukić also breaks the frame, at times taking the film
outside the shop, introducing flashbacks from Zeko’s memories and
writing new cameo-esque characters into the script, some of them were
played by legendary actors like Boro
Stjepanović and Vlasta
Velisavljević. However, the acting
style of the ensemble reprising their roles from the play is
different, cinematic and more realistic, making The
Frog far more than merely a piece of
filmed theatre.